Dinakaran's pre-emptive resignation scuttles probe

NEW DELHI: Despite the heightened public concern about corruption, Justice P D Dinakaran has succeeded in his attempt to scuttle a judicial probe against him with a pre-emptive resignation. By a letter dated September 23, the chairman of Rajya Sabha, Hamid Ansari, quietly buried the committee which had been constituted under the Judges (Inquiry) Act to investigate the allegations of corruption against Dinakaran.

This was in response to a letter written five days earlier by the committee's chairman, SC judge Aftab Alam, informing Ansari about the need to fill up a vacancy in the committee caused by the elevation of one of its members, Justice J S Khehar, to the apex court.

Rather than appointing another HC chief justice to take Khehar's place in the committee, Ansari wound up the committee and the reason he cited for it was Dinakaran's resignation in July. In the process, Ansari accepted Dinakaran's contention that the whole impeachment move should be scrapped on account of his resignation from his last posting as chief justice of the Sikkim high court.

This is despite the fact that the implication of Dinakaran's resignation was the very issue on which the committee, consisting then of Alam, Khehar and jurist Mohan Gopal, had already issued a notice to him a month ago to determine whether the probe should continue or not.

Thus, Ansari used the accident of Khehar's elevation to pre-empt the statutory committee from deciding its course of action. As a result, there would be no judicial finding on the veracity of the allegations that Dinakaran, when he had been a judge in the Madras high court and chief justice in the Karnataka high court, had misused his powers to grab properties and subvert justice.

Even after he had been held guilty by the judicial committee, Justice V Ramaswami of the Supreme Court survived the impeachment move in 1993 simply because Congress MPs in Lok Sabha had en bloc abstained voting.

Justice Soumitra Sen of the Calcutta high court resigned on September 1 after Rajya Sabha had voted in favor of his removal and when Lok Sabha was set to take up the impeachment motion.

If Sen's resignation interrupted the political process, Dinakaran's resignation interrupted the judicial process involved in the procedure for removing judges.